I’ll make a serious point here for a change. It’s true that the Presidency often changes a person, but most of the time it’s done so in a positive way – it seems to imbue the person with a sense of great duty, which tends to have at least some effect in advancing public interests. A good example was Nixon, fundamentally self-serving and dishonest, who nevertheless left a fairly decent legacy except for the part about being a crook and absconding before he could be impeached. It’s the same thing that happens to the average person who rants and raves about jailing criminals for life and throwing away the key, and suddenly becomes incredibly conscientious when actually empowered by jury duty.
The problem is that neither of these clowns – neither Trump nor Palin – has sufficient intellectual acuity to be subject to this Presidential transformation. In my view they’re intellectually vapid and morally bankrupt. Given an option, Palin would be better only because Trump, in addition to being a dumbass, suffers from enormous personal insecurities and a really vicious vindictiveness, along with supercharged personal drive. Palin is just a lazy dumb hillbilly.
The question is about as silly as asking whether I’d prefer a cockroach or an earthworm. Analysis wouldn’t focus on their relative IQ’s, but on their relative life expectancies.
OTOH, either of them might make a better President than Rubio or Cruz. We can hope that generals and under-secretaries would be wise enough to ignore the barfings coming from the Oval Office of Trump or Palin. Cruz and Rubio have, unfortunately, a veneer of sanity.
Extremely tough question…but if I was pressed and had to choose, I’d go with the relatively-harmless idiot who would do nothing (Palin) over the bomb ready to explode (Trump).
As much as I hate listening to Trump speak I think having to hear Palin’s shrill, screechy voice on the news every night would be worse. That said, I think Palin would be more than happy to cover all the celebrity duties of the presidency and leave the thinkin’ stuff to smart people.
Tough choice, I’d go Trump.
That is so inspirational that it almost drives me to tears! “Vote for my guy, he’s probably not horrible, and even if he is, and he does destroy the country, in another four years you might be able to vote for someone who isn’t my guy. What could be better than that?”
After which I presume Ben Carson falls asleep, or else goes into a catatonic stupor from the sheer energy-draining emotional power of that pronouncement.
Have you noticed how few Trump endorsements are really endorsements? ALthough it’s refreshing in a way, because typical politicians generally feed their endorsers talking points. It’s obvious Trump isn’t.
What really bugs me about the opposition to Trump is that they aren’t hitting on the obvious way to deal with him: straight talk. People like that Trump is blunt. Be blunt then! Stop relying on talking points and focus groups and internal polling and handlers to decide what you’re going to say that day and what all your allies are going to say. Trump’s doing none of that shit and he’s doing pretty well for himself. If he’s done one good thing it’s proved that all those rules about what you supposedly can and can’t say are wrong. Ben Carson was doing great too until his extreme ignorance was exposed. and he also said a lot of really offensive things. Imagine what a candidate could do who was actually smart and decent but not afraid to speak their mind.
We’d basically have Joe Biden. Would that be so bad?
Wasn’t sure this was worth starting a new thread over, so I figured I’d revive this one: imagine that pesky Amendment wasn’t there, and imagine you now have to choose between the first term for Trump and an after-all-this-time third term for Dubya.
That’s easy. While I think Dubya was the worst President ever, he’d immediately drop to second-to-worst if Trump (or Cruz or Rubio) were elected. I’d take Dubya without hesitation.
And, while during the early years of Dubya’s Administration he was doing just what Dick Cheney and Karl Rove told him to do, towards the end he’d come to the realization that Cheney’s advice had been mostly wrong. He started thinking for himself; even though thinking wasn’t his long suit it was better than being the puppet of two personifications of evil.
A harder decision would be Kasich vs Dubya. Kasich is much more competent, but also more right-wing.
Fortunately we don’t need to choose from among these; we can elect a Democrat. We want the GOP to nominate whoever is most likely to lead to Democrat landslide … but I’m not certain who that would be.
I find this debate interesting, not the least because of an op-ed piece in Thursday’s Chicago Tribune.
You may not be aware that the Trib is pretty much a pro-Republican paper. (As an aside, the editorial in that same edition talked about the Trib’s role in the nomination of Abraham Lincoln, before coming out strongly in favor of a brokered convention this year.) The column is by Steve Chapman who is on the Trib’s editorial board. It says in part:
"It’s not always possible to identify the moment when a journey to destruction began. But in the case of the Republican Party, there is no doubt: Friday, Aug. 29, 2008. That day, presidential nominee John McCain announced that his running mate would be Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. It was a test for McCain and the GOP rank and file. Both failed, and the party has never recovered.
“The problem is not that Palin was a poor candidate who helped drag the ticket to defeat. The problem is that she was celebrated for qualities that were irrelevant and excused for defects that should have been disqualifying. Instead of recognizing her inadequacy, Republicans hailed her backcountry hockey-mom persona, her scorn for the ‘spinelessness’ of elites, her inflammatory rhetoric and her inexperience in the matters a vice president and president have to handle.”
The column concludes:
"William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, wrote recently in opposition to Trump, calling him the ‘epitome of vulgarity’ and his campaign a form of ‘two-bit Caesarism.’ But in the summer of 2008, Kristol called on McCain to choose Palin, who fits the same description.
“In wrapping its arms around her, the Republican Party sold its soul. Trump is just here to collect.”
If faced with absolutely having to decide between one or the other, I guess I’d pick Palin. But I’d be crying as I did so.
My husband says this choice is kind of like those grade school discussions, for example “would you rather freeze or burn to death”, except there really doesn’t seem to be a “better” death here. This one is more like, “would you rather roll in broken glass while being doused with lemon juice or would you rather swim with sharks that perpetually eat you, but never kill you.”